Because there are still times when I have to contend with disappointing cancellations here in San Francisco, I sometimes use the time available to revisit live-streamed performances by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO). The ensemble has an impressive Live from Orchestra Hall video archive that was one of my first valuable resources in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. When I found out that my plans for last night involved a cancelled program, I decided to take advantage of the latest live-stream offering from DSO.
The program was prepared and conducted by Music Director Jader Bignamini; and, on this particular occasion, I was struck by the informative nature of spoken remarks he delivered to the audience. Usually, such editorializing tends to rub me the wrong way; but then I realized that those watching the live-stream did not have the program books that had been given to the audience in Orchestra Hall. Bignamini did not provide oral accounts of “learned essays;” but he did prepare those with little (if any) background for each of the three works on the program.
Those three works followed the usual overture-concerto-symphony plan. However, only the symphony was familiar to most of the audience (in Orchestra Hall, as well as cyberspace). That was Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 92 (seventh) symphony in A major. With the advantage of video direction, it was possible for the viewer to become better acquainted with Bignamini’s techniques as a conductor. One came away with the impression that he had endowed each of the four movements with its own set of dispositions while also maintaining a sense of the whole emerging from those four parts.
Most interesting was when he set aside his baton for the second movement. This is the “slow movement” to which Beethoven gave the tempo marking Allegretto. This inconsistency seems to have been conceived by the composer as a means of calling attention to rich embellishments that emerge over a more stately and steady pace. Bignamini knew that maintaining that underlying pace could be left to the Concertmaster and section leaders; so he used both of his hands (and a generous amount of body language) to guide the ensemble through the shaping of those embellishments. Thus, while some may claim that there was too much repetition on the score pages, Bignamini focused on the immediacy in the details of every moment.
Mind you, that sense of immediacy prevailed over all four of the symphony’s movements. However, the spontaneity of tempo was more critical in the first, third, and fourth of those movements. Bignamini’s baton work allowed him to communicate that spontaneity to the entire ensemble, providing in-the-moment freshness to one of Beethoven’s most familiar symphonies.
Because Opus 92 is so familiar, Bignamini planned the first half of the program with “opportunities for discovery.” They began with the “overture,” which was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Opus 63 “Symphonic Variations on an African Air.” This may have been composed for one of his visits to the United States, where New York musicians came to refer to him as the “African Mahler.” (Bignamini shared that epithet with his audience, probably drawing upon the same Wikipedia resources as the rest of us!) One could readily appreciate the composer’s “free” approach to his variations and the rich diversity of his instrumentation. (The video direction did much to expose the video viewer to the richness of those approaches.)
Trumpeter Hunter Eberly playing Arutiunian’s concerto (screen shot from the performance being discussed)
The concerto soloist was DSO Principal Trumpet Hunter Eberly, performing a concerto composed by Alexander Arutiunian at the middle of the twentieth century. This was my first encounter with any trumpet concerto composed in the twentieth century. The structure followed the usual three-movement form; but the movements flowed into each other with no interruption. Thus, the concerto was “whole cloth,” which was easily “parsed” into “components.” Eberly discussed the popularity of this concerto when he was interviewed during an “intermission feature” for the video. Since I did not even know that it existed prior to yesterday, I clearly have much to learn about the brass repertoire!
Taken as a whole, the program that Bignamini prepared had just the right blend of familiarity and discovery, and I suspect that this will be far from my last encounter with DSO video offerings.
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